Baltimore has been wrestling with yet another police scandal. Last month, the city public defender’s office discovered body camera footage showing a local cop placing a bag of heroin in a pile of a trash in an alley. The cop, unaware he was being filmed, walked out of the alley, “turned on” his camera, and went back to “find” the drugs. The cop then arrested a man for the heroin and placed him in jail. The man, who couldn’t afford to post the $50,000 bail, languished there for seven months. He was finally released two weeks ago, after the public defender’s office sent the video to the state attorney.

The officer, Richard Pinheiro, has been suspended with pay, while two other cops in the video have been placed on administrative duty as the investigation pends. More than 30 other cases the three officers were to serve as witnesses for are now being dismissed. On Monday night, the Baltimore Sun reported that the public defender’s office found a second video that appeared to show different cops “manufacturing evidence.” (The second video has not been released.)

Police body camera footage of officer Richard Pinheiro allegedly planting drugs at a crime scene. Courtesy of Baltimore’s Office of the Public Defender

Now, as the credibility of the entire police-worn body camera program is called into question, the public anxiously waits to see if these two videos will actually lead to any sort of consequences. At a press conference on August 2, Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis stressed that the body camera program — which he’s committed to — is still fairly new, and there have been some understandable growing pains as officers adjust to the new technology. “While [those gaps in video footage were] ugly, and while I’m disappointed that officers in these two incidents did not have their cameras on, I think it’s irresponsible to jump to a conclusion that the police officers were engaged in criminal misconduct,” he said, urging the public to withhold its judgment until the investigation is complete.

“This is a critical test, and so far the BPD is failing,” said David Rocah, the senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland. “The only way not to fail is for these officers to be held accountable, at least at the departmental level. And if that doesn’t happen, and they don’t suffer the most serious consequences, then I think the body camera program, and all the hopes for it, will have been set back almost irreparably.”

The revelations in the Baltimore case came on the heels of a recent police shooting in Minneapolis, where a local officer fatally shot a white woman who had called 911 to report a possible assault behind her house. The officer had his body camera turned off, so there is no video evidence of the incident. In response to the shooting, the Minneapolis police chief resigned, and the city’s police department updated its body camera policy, outlining more concretely when cameras must be activated.

Baltimore, however, doesn’t have Minneapolis’s problem of a vague policy. The Maryland city developed relatively strong guidelines for their body camera program, which was rolled out in May 2016. Under the policy, unless it’s unsafe, impossible, or impractical to do so, Baltimore cops must activate their cameras “at the initiation of a call for service or other activity or encounter that is investigative or enforcement-related in nature.”

It’s hard to overstate just how devastating this news is for Baltimore – a city desperately trying to restore trust between its residents and the police. In 2016, the prosecution of six officers charged with Freddie Gray’s death in police custody ended with no convictions; the Department of Justice published a damning report finding Baltimore cops engaged in systemic racism and cruelty toward survivors of sexual assault; and, on top of everything else, Bloomberg revealed that the police had been secretly filming the city for months from small planes in the sky. Baltimore is also reckoning with several years of staggeringly high homicide rates, claiming over 200 murders already this year.

Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Kevin Davis, center, listens as Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, right, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, speaks during a press conference at City Hall highlighting a Justice Department investigation into the police department in Baltimore on August 10, 2016.

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

At a press conference on July 19, Davis, the police commissioner, emphasized that he understands the gravity of the body camera allegations. “There’s nothing that deteriorates the trust of any community more than thinking for one second that uniformed police officers — or police officers in general — would plant evidence of crimes on citizens,” he said. “That’s as serious as it gets.” Davis also left open the possibility that the officers were re-enacting a drug discovery.

However, Rocah, the ACLU attorney, who served on a city working group to develop recommendations for Baltimore’s body camera program, said the fact that stronger disciplinary action hasn’t already been taken against Pinheiro — and that he’s still getting paid — is wholly indefensible.

“If you take their story at face value — and, frankly, why would anyone do that? — but if you do, they were engaged in a good-faith search when they found the drugs. And when they realized they had turned off the cameras they decided to recreate it with cameras on,” Rocah told The Intercept. “That’s also called lying, which is both potentially criminal and a violation of department rules.”

Complicating matters further is a Maryland Court of Appeals decision from 2015, which held that victims of police misconduct do not have a right to learn about departmental investigations into their complaints, including whether discipline was ultimately imposed. The Maryland State Police successfully argued in court that such documents are confidential “personnel records” that cannot be disclosed through the state’s public record law. The Maryland ACLU has since been pressuring the legislature to allow for public access to police misconduct records, to little avail.

What this means is that, although the credibility of Baltimore’s police body camera program hangs in the balance, the department may not actually share the details of its investigation — or its outcome — with the public.

The Intercept asked the Baltimore police department if it would tell the public if it moved to discipline Pinheiro, through firing or otherwise. T.J. Smith, the spokesperson for the department, responded, “We aren’t at that point, and I’m not going to speculate.”

All of this comes in the context of a president who just last week endorsed police brutality in front of a crowd of law enforcement officers, and an attorney general who once called court-ordered consent decrees — which are legal settlements between a city and the Justice Department overseen by a federal judge — “undemocratic” and “dangerous.” (Baltimore’s police department, to its credit, remains committed to its new police reform consent decree, even as other cities, such as Chicago, have been shirking similar tools since Trump came to power.)

“The White House wants to use surveillance tools when it’s beneficial to them, but shut them down or preclude your access when it hurts,” said Anne McKenna, a visiting law professor at Penn State University and an expert on technology and surveillance. “You have a president who doesn’t want White House press conferences to be recorded, while he goes around delegitimizing what the news media reports. His actions have been incredibly frightening for civil liberties and First Amendment rights.”

The Department of Justice declined The Intercept’s request for comment on the incidents in Baltimore and Minneapolis, and whether its position on body cameras remains as it had been under former President Barack Obama. The Obama administration, which endorsed body cameras as an effective tool to promote police accountability, released guidelines for body camera implementation in 2014, later awarding over $20 million to law enforcement agencies to establish body camera programs.

Lindsay Miller Goodison, a senior researcher with the Police Executive Research Forum who helped the DOJ develop its body camera guidelines, couldn’t say how many agencies currently use body cameras and of those agencies, how many have written policies. “I don’t think anyone has done a comprehensive survey to really get those numbers clearly,” she said.

In terms of accountability, Miller Goodison acknowledged guidelines did not wade into specifics about what accountability should look like if police officers violate body camera policies. “We focused on accountability mechanisms but, with 18,000 police agencies across the country, it would be pretty hard to come up with an appropriate list of consequences.”

Top photo: Police officer Craig Murray is geared with a body camera during a training session in Clearwater, Fla., on July 7, 2015.

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“I think it’s irresponsible to jump to a conclusion that the police officers were NOT engaged in criminal misconduct”

There, fixed it for ya!

Honestly, what a steaming pile of crap; you catch the officers in the second most heinous type crime they might commit (the most heinous being inflicting physical harm), and they get administrative duty? Suspension for a while?! WTF?! If it was any NON-cop, they’d be on the hook for serious felonies and facing multiple-decade sentences in PRISON.

“[If] they [the cops] don’t suffer the most serious consequences, then I think the body camera program, and all the hopes for it, will have been set back almost irreparably.”

That would be extremely unfortunate AND a really stupid outcome; what’s needed are body cams AND strict rules that if they’re turned off while on-duty, that’s a fireable offense, that any police work that includes ANYTHING against a defendant during such a period must be thrown out, no matter WHAT the defendant is alleged to have done, and that if a camera is discovered to be or somehow becomes inoperable during duty, the officer MUST stop serving until the problem is rectified.

In addition, how about “live streaming” uploads to a server that the police do not control and cannot manipulate, Hmmm?…

This is ALL they know how to do and teach, go into low income communities and arrest many NON-violent people. They could easy track, monitor and investigate VIOLENT drug dealers and/or users, NOPE, arrest and ruin the lives of, generally speaking, harmless users and dealers. Do not get me wrong, there must be some laws and regulations in place to keep order, but the current way has not worked in decades ( It never worked). Many cops are privileged and have complete disconnect attitude towards the communities they police.

The public, public’s rights and the constitution seem to be a nuisance to the police state and their supporters in government. We are not being well represented. In fact, we appear to be being subverted by our own “elected” officials. This thing reeks (the planting of evidence) and what reeks more is the lack of any accountability. Until there is some justice for Freddie Grey – there will never be any integrity in Baltimore but we (the public) don’t expect too much from what we’ve seen to date.

ok. If your body cams are on for 30m and you come up empty after holding a person in limbo, aka arrested movement, for that entire time, and you call it quits, or whatever, and turn your body cam off and then turn your body cam on and voila – suddenly there appears evidence…. IN THE INTEREST OF PRESERVING A NON-POLICE STATE, that evidence is DISQUALIFIED. But go ahead and confiscate it. Then give the nice police officers 3 days off without pay.

Thank you Rachel for this enlightening and sobering article. It should enlighten and educate any stupid white Trumpite to the double standard that exists between the police and the general public with regards to being charged with a crime (with undisputable evidence of guilt) and being allowed to walk free -no bail required!
True ongoing proof of a police state.
Q) How long did it take the Minneapolis to relieve itself of an unreasonable police chief after an unreasonable killing of a white woman?
A) One week.
Q) How long did it take the city of Baltimore to release a man after being framed by a policeman (and his crew of uniformed coconspirators)?
A) Over 6 months.
Now let’s just review an obvious list of possible crimes this -badged pillar of the community Richard Pinheiro has committed:
1) manufacturing evidence
2) giving false information to a police officer
3) perjury
4) possession of a controlled substance (heroin)
5) possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute
6) obstruction of Justice
Just getting warmed up.
Back to the subject…
Q) Would the police in ANY state let ANY such suspect walk free with video evidence of their guilt in hand?
A) Only if he has a “get out of jail free card” -a police badge.
The rules don’t apply to “the club” (police, politicians, or the military high command).

Sadly this is exactly the kind of policing that many Americans applaud. Don’t kid yourselves, Americans love police abuses and atrocities. Because it doesn’t happen to them it only happens to “those people”

Most cops have always been questionable people. Cops have always messed with minorities and the poor. But now, after 40 years of a (drug) war against the American people the bar has steadily lowered and the available pool of applicants has shrunk. I mean, who in their right minds aspire to be drug warriors. What we have left are too many despicable people in the higher ranks that hire and train people who are just like them. The training is ridiculous but its really a screening problem. BTW, since when has donning a cop or military uniform automatically transformed a person into a ‘hero’ ?

Random story idea: I know that a lot of right-wingers will rag on people here for always focusing on what the police do wrong. Is it possible to pick out and feature the single best big city police department – the one that has all the right policies on body cams, tasers, high speed pursuits, racial profiling and so on, the one that doesn’t violate people’s rights or shoot innocent people by accident? I mean, liberals could really use to have some kind of cop ally when everything goes wrong in America.

I want to add to my comment, that I think it is unfortunate (and to me annoying), that I’ve seen technologists and the media using terms like “surveillance state” & “deep state”, instead of what is probably more appropriate, “the police state”.

If the workings of a government isn’t democratic, it is probably isn’t civil, and instead run by military or the police, thus “the police state”! I’d argue that the same way one can’t call the military ‘civil’, one also can’t call the state civil, if explicitly omitting the democratic part, otherwise the police state would be just a negative sounding label, with no deeper meaning to it.

If anyone reading this, thinks that ‘a state’ has a right to do everything in their power “to want to defend themselves”, you probably know already that this type of sentiment isn’t true, so ‘the state’ cannot be this holy cow that has to be there, regardless of behavior.

While both terms have similarities with a police state, there are big differences. One can spy on lots of people without necessarily having a police state, like the UK. The “deep state” could be summed up more as the Intelligence complex. Thank God there are restrictions on CIA/domestic police info sharing…though Trump (and others) might want those torn down…

Do you seriously believe that restrictions on CIA/domestic police info sharing stop them? There is evidence that the CIA has been embedded in the major police departments over the years. Dallas and Los Angeles are two examples.

I think the fact that you mince words there and say “could be summed up more as the intelligence complex” goes to show that you are biased for having a “deep state” and the like.

Although I think that one ought-not-use a word like “police state” as a mere negative label (because the policing of some rules and regulations would be something most people would probably want), I really think this word ought to be rehabilitated and revered to avoid the kind of word stew that are probably invented by the state somehow, or by sympathizers, like national media, which as an institution probably end up taking on a role of simply opining about what is best for the establishment as such. I was about to write “for the country” but I don’t think that is true, because the country would include the general populace.

It seems obvious to me that there are more similarities between a “state” and a “police state”, than there is a difference, mainly because a “state” has and is traditionally at odds with the general populace, the state being something akin to a ruling class in a way and being paranoid and corrupt (grabbing /using power when it pleases). Just think of the ongoing killings of regular people in US by the police, who obviously isn’t there to “protect and to serve”, unless ofc that slogan refer to the police force itself. Glossing over something like that is a disservice to a criticism of understanding what ‘a statehood’ is (and you probably aren’t even a part of the state, unless you directly work for the state), and when things pile up, I think it is just wrong to pretend that the very existence of bad behavior is just another ‘aspect’ of the state, as if compelled to make use of some kind of ironic distancing by using words like “surveillance state” or “deep state”, and as if this was to be expected and to be accepted.

Obviously, this notion of the state leaving you alone, as if you yourself simply had “freedom” would imo not be a good measure for whether or not the “state” is a ‘police state’. Not only because some things in life is larger than the concern for the individual (like for the concern/care for people in groups, or other types of demographics) , but also because that would be other more important qualifiers which shouldn’t be glossed over, just because you aren’t directly bothered by it personally.

So you claim there are big differences between a ‘police state’ and ‘surveillance state’ & ‘deep state’. I think not, and I want to stress that as long as people and the media pretends that the ‘surveillance state’ and the ‘deep state’ are meaningful labels to be used for circulation in matters of more serious debate, such sentiments are not only just tragic (never knowing), but also deceitful, because if the media aren’t involved in truth seeking, that media machinery could be said to always have this propensity of fielding unbridled nationalism and propaganda for the state (as if “the state” needed help).

I think there is this one disturbing element to the use of police cameras, which they should have worked out from the very start I think.

So, someone not knowing much about such types of cameras, it seems to me that the use of police cameras is more like a “soft” self policing, as if it is all up to the individual officer of monitoring him-/herself, which seems at odds with any departmental need for surveillance of their own police officers. And presumably, it makes sense that the government want to be surveilling their own police officers, or who else would have this need of monitoring the work of police officers this way AND for what reason? There might imo be unclarity about this simple motivation, which might ultimately corrupt this type of technology use legally, if this motivation is not well founded, and so subject to potential re-write/re-invention legally, to fit whatever political narrative a government or a police unit might desire.

Imo this leaves another take on the use of police cameras on police officers, as if the cameras were set up by the rules, so as to be meant to incriminate would-be-criminals (a new angle on double jeopardy maybe? Unsure, something in the back of my head irking me that this might be a thing somehow), and not really to control and surveilling their own police officers.

It seems so obvious to me that they should have set the basic rules straight from the very start, instead, I am reading that the police dept. that shot that Australian woman has clarified its rules for having the cameras on, which shouldn’t have been necessary I think.

In the wake of all this terrible news about lack of privacy rights and computer security, I can’t help but wonder if this type of use of police cameras face a problem of having to *stil* bel working out the terminology properly, or risk being corrupted by abuse of language. The thing is that, there ought to be a different between the words “surveillance” (the intention) and the “monitoring” (the actual tools/tech used), specifically on a philosophical level. Which so far, seem to leave a philosophical/practical problem of ‘monitoring’ being IN PLACE, yet still denying that there would be any surveillance going on, as if a stated/proven intention was required for putting people under surveillance this way. This matches what was said by an officer in norway in public, which laughably claimed that they were NOT interested in regular people, as if the trust in such a statement would make monitoring and surveillance ok, or as a lawyer put it, something about mass surveillance turning everybody a suspect. So every time an authority gets away with using ‘monitoring’ and ‘surveillance’ as a dichotomy (“It’s just monitoring, not surveillance, so relax!”), or equally obscene, (“This is just a necessary piece of technology, not a monitoring device, pretend it isn’t here/there!”, they get away with corrupting the world with what seems to have been going on for some time, mass surveillance of the populace, as if waving the police state along to mind its own business as usual.

With the lack of clarity of rules and law, with agencies doing what they way, I think that is a prime example of the idiom: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, because, you become corrupt when you willfully use/take on powers that aren’t meant to be given to you.

Here’s a novel idea: let’s change the way we select and train police officers. First, by imposing standards for qualification and behavior at the national level, so that the police in Baltimore are as qualified and well trained as those in . . . .(well, I can’t name a city in the US, but you get the idea). Second by imposing screening requirements that include aptitude and psychological testing to cull out the scum and cowards. Third, by mandating training so that officers are able to deal effectively with the very stressful situations they often find themselves in. And fourth, by removing the incentive to make false arrests as a path to advancement.

A real nove l idea: How about we just put evil cops in Prison when they get caught doing evil things. That seems simpler than rewarding them with extra “TRAINING”. They know full and well that to plant heroin on innocent people , WRECKS those people’s lives. The guy referenced in the article, was looking at 15 years for that heroin had the video not come out. The officer should face a minimum of 15 years for possession of the heroin and his demonstrated intent to frame a citizen for it.

Yes, we should eliminate the incentives for police to plant evidence or make arrest quotas, but the greatest incentive at all is the knowledge that if they get caught, the department will still back them, and still try and concoct some justification where the citizen is still guilty. That is perverse. We don’t need better trained officers – we need a complete overhaul of an overtly unconstitutional and oppressive system that is consciously aware of what it is.

Yes, so true. When it comes to the public they can’t wait to throw the book at us. When they make a mistake, it is a matter of poor training. When the laws are applied righteously we will see things improve across the board. Unfortunately, the US system of government seems to corrupted with a “political class” that things only seem to get worse.

Forbidding the cops from turning the cameras off is iffy because they talk to informants and witnesses. If a central police server has all that stuff… those sources will either wisely dry up, or messily get cleaned up, at least where any important criminals are concerned.

Conceivably, the cop could have an encryption capability to enable, but this requires (a) genuine, secure, back-door free encryption, which is about as common as unicorns and cockatrices, and (b) a disregard for the sort of hardball shown in https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/23/francis-rawls-philadelphia-police-child-abuse-encryption (I can’t find it now, but I think Rawls originally claimed he was protecting informants … unless I have him mixed up with another case). (You may think my first and second objections are a contradiction, but according to that article, even though the files were “encrypted” something was faithfully keeping a record of hash tags so that they could be matched up with a database of Banned Material. So the encryption is perfect, aside from the guy spending the rest of his life in jail for his “secret” content, unless the company/government are keeping the other back doors secret since he’s in jail anyway!)

That said, OBVIOUSLY there needs to be not merely policy but law regarding “reenacting” scenes for police cameras that are supposed to impartially record evidence. If the case here doesn’t lead to prosecution, then the policy was crookedly built from the beginning. If a cop gets the evidence off camera, he can go on and hold it up and say this is where I found it, that’s still better testimony the same day than five months later.

Of course, if we didn’t have dumb ass drug laws then there would be so much less for cops to record in the first place!

i’m sorry (not) but recording of witnesses and such is not the problem you might pretend it to be. First, such recorded talks are actually good for actual facts in court cases days or years down the road. Second, they are not released to the public. Third, keeping a body cam on while SEARCHING FOR EVIDENCE or CHASING OR SHOOTING AT A SUSPECT or INTEROGATING A SUSPECT is really not a huge problem for anyone with half a brain. It’s real simple… CHASING? SHOOTING? INTEROGATING? SEARCHING? keep your camera rolling

I left a previous request to have someone explain how the camera records 30secs before the cop hits the button . Here’s how this sham works:
So the camera is recording all the time but until the cop hits the button only 30 seconds of video is stored . This means that it is not a battery problem, as reported by the MSM, since the camera is always recording .
When the cop hits the button he merely switches on more storage . This “feature” is necessary because what cop would want all of his “on-duty” actions recorded ?
OF COURSE ITS BY DESIGN !!!!!

Oh, it does have significant relevance. First of all, the police chief in the Minneapolis case resigned soon thereafter. Which police chief resigned after all the unarmed blacks were killed? Second, I am willing to bet that the police officer who killed the lady in Minneapolis WILL be convicted for killing the lady who called the police, and rightfully so, because he has two strikes against him for being Muslim and black. What police officer has been convicted, even in the rare occasion when they were charged for killing unarmed black people?

So, the writer is not engaging in racism – just reflecting the reality of policing and the justice system in America. I know a lot of people paint this topic as a political one by labeling it as “liberal” or “conservative”, depending on which side one is on but the reality is that it is a human rights and civil rights issue where NO American should be subjected to unfair treatment based on their looks, gender, race, etc. We have a system that was “designed” to be fair that in reality is absolutely NOT fair.

What? Someone named Cohen is a racist?? No way! “Oppressed minorities a cannot be racist because racism is a tool of the powerful to oppress the powerless.”

And: If you could possibly take a minute to study the MPLS case, you would find that those particular “progressive” white women could use a few of them to get shot once in awhile, and share the burden everyone else is under, shouldering this new police state.

These are the women who cheer on the growth of the privatized prison system; who cheer on every rape hoax and every false flag, and cry out for more policing; and that even as they cry out for the castration of ‘rapists’ who were created BY women just like them.

Then, they go to all the cop bars in North East MPLS, and try to elbow with police power, and pimp their daughters to police power, drressing their sons in drag cuz’ it gets em off.

Between the “sex wars” of the 80’s where my dear sainted mother and a cultist named Catherine McKinnon waged a war on pornography, and today, as these same women distribute it as a tool with which to compromise and blackmail people-that state has seen it’s share of hoaxes and frauds-all of which garner it 65 BILLION dollars in federal funding every year.

Then, there is the issue of how they are literally in bed with the police, and the fact that Somali’s there are a highly targeted group of these exact women’s policies.

Every surveillance abuse that the Intercept writes about was virtually birthed from the brain connected loins of these type of Minnesota white women, who have historically been a protected species (shiksa’s are special dontchaknow).

The police chief of course, was a part-Native lesbian, and NO STATE save perhaps S. Dakota has worked harder to bastardize native Americans; the police union guy refused to support her and make a statement-it’s time to destroy these public sector unions once and for all-as they wield too much power.

Yeah- and I for one roll with glee when I see one f those demons go down-it’s about time white women in general, and specifically there experience a bit of what the rest of us are going through.

The cameras are not turned off, it seems that police bought cameras that do not have enough storage, they have to turn the cameras on when they want to record. Yes, this is very stupid, but probably by design. And now that they all know that it records 30 secs prior to being set to record, catching cops planting evidence will probably not happen again.
In my opinion they should have cameras that continuously stream video to a server, that way cops would not be able to destroy the evidence when they know they are wrong. But at the very least they should have cameras with enough storage to record EVERYTHING for the length of time they are on duty, the minute they start their shift to the minute they get off duty.

Absolutely agree. In this day and age. there is no reason why the cameras cannot be continuously on. If storage at the officer level is an issue and streaming to the cloud is impractical, then one alternative would be to stream to storage in the vehicle, when the officer returns to the vehicle, with automatic upload , with no office involvement, when the vehicle returns to the station. Also, anti-tampering measures are a must.

So the camera is recording all the time but until the cop hits the button only 30 seconds of video is stored . This means that it is not a battery problem, as reported by the MSM, since the camera is always recording .
When the cop hits the button he merely switches on more storage . This “feature” is necessary because what cop would want all of his “on-duty” actions recorded ?
OF COURSE ITS BY DESIGN !!!!!

chewing gum works
well chewed gum is easily parsed and distributed
it will cover both the lens and mic port
and it can even be divided among all participants
and when the frame job is done, the gum can be collected, re-assembled, and returned to the chewer for rechewing until the next time
expect a rise in gum sales
be extra polite to officers chewing gum
no problem